I recognize that This Is How It Always Is is an important book, on some level. As one reviewer on Goodreads wrote, "we need LGBTQIAP+ stories that don't end in tragedy." I agree entirely, and this is a start at that. But this book felt, to me, a bit like an after school special. It tackled a hard topic in an instructive manner. It felt like its purpose was to give parents and families tools to navigate raising a transgender child (or really any child today, who is part of a generation whose experience of gender is different from the one I and my generation had growing up). I won't go so far as to claim I don't need help navigating this myself. I know I'm still biased by the binary understanding of gender that I grew up with. I do training on diversity and inclusion in my professional life, and one of the things I tell people is to listen, learn, and take cues from younger generations to understand what gender means to them, because that is their reality and we're living in it too. That's something I strive to do in my own life, and this was one of the major lessons of the book: the children (and not just the trans child) understood things the parents couldn't. My big complaint, really, is that I'm not looking for heavy-handed lessons in my literature. In fact, reading this was almost like work. (I'm actually contemplating recommending this book to my boss.)
I have some other complaints too. I was a little resistant to this book before I even started it. The thought I kept having was, "I don't want to read a book about parenting." (This very much IS a book about parenting.) Now, as someone who does try to reflect on and poke at my own biases, I have to admit there's something going on here that's probably worth exploring. I especially don't want to read a book about an upper middle class white parents with five kids that is explicitly about raising those kids. This is just not something that interests me. This feeling didn't go away, even as I was reading the book. It's engaging, it's easy to read, and I want to participate in my book club ... so I just kept going, but I found some of it very tiresome. The portion of the book where the mom and kid up and move to Thailand for a few weeks (months?) was much more interesting to me than, like, the daily parenting and schooling and feeding in the rest of the book. This is my own bias, and I recognize it. The other thing that bugged me about the book, which I guess I've sort of alluded to above, was just the straight up privilege. I say this as an upper middle class white person, but it was just so unrealistic. An ER and later family practice doctor supporting her family of 7 (seven!!) on a single salary? In Seattle? The struggling writer husband, struggling to write a book for close to 20 years, and like, it's no big deal? The weird pressure from her fellow family practice doctor to go to Thailand (and/or run their practice's social media??)? The book was tackling one challenging aspect of this family's life, and to do that every other challenge they faced was essentially elided.
